No, I Can’t Digg It

I read an interesting article on CNet.UK the other day entitled “Digg is Dead”. The author of the article believed Digg died because it was outplayed by the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Google. And while I agree that Digg is dead and social networking sites have played a role in its demise, I believe there were other factors at work, internal and external, that put a nail in Digg’s coffin.

There was a time not too far back when I went to Digg three or four times a day. Since articles get voted up or down, even if you check back every 20 minutes or so, you will find a few new articles popping up. That was all well and good, until about three months before last years presidential election.

Digg has always been a left-leaning site. But as it is with all my entertainment, I have an 90/10 rule. I’ll put up with 10% biased crap if there’s 90% neutral content. However, about three months before the election, nearly every single article voted to the front page of Digg was a pro-Obama or anti-McCain post. It got to the point where it was painful to read the absolute nonsense that was posted there. The bias was revolting, the things said about Palin, McCain and Bush were appalling, and the people that ran Digg didn’t step in and stop the nonsense in its tracks. It became another state-run media outlet.

So I left. But the day after the election I went back and found the negative posts were all gone.

But that was a big strike one. For many people. And I know many people never returned to Digg after that.

Digg wasn’t quite the same, but I decided to give it another shot, as they had a feature I really liked: the email shout-out.

Like other networking groups, Digg has a “friends” feature. I had about 500 friends on my list, people that were like-minded. You could take an article or post and send it out via the email shout-out to 200 of your friends at one time. They could Digg your post up or send it along to their friends. As I said, it was a great feature that not only drove traffic to Mitchieville, but was good for Digg as well.

In Digg’s ultimate wisdom, they took away the shout-out feature and replaced it with absolutely nothing. And that was it for The Mayor. And if I was to guess, I would say that was it for a lot of people.

Considering Digg wasn’t offering much, to take away what little they had left, gave me no choice but to leave and delete its bookmark.

I don’t miss Digg though, it ended up for me being little more than a giant frustration I could easily live without.

Rest in Pieces, Digg. And do the world a favour and take your ugly whore sister, Reddit, with you.

This entry was posted
on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 6:57 pm and is filed under Media Bias.
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